Indian Filmmakers Turn to AI Amid Industry Struggles

“I am a firm believer in technology to make content faster, better, and more economical. This has to happen, otherwise we will never come out of the flux the filmmaking business is in right now. We can’t take many years and millions of dollars to make films at scale.”

“Today, I do not have to spend hundreds of crores on telling a story like Mahabharat, which requires massive sets and actors. We have invested in hiring humans, who can create an expensive location of Hastinapur by giving the right command to AI tools.”

“The cost of movies and the time it takes is easily less than half of what it would cost to make a feature film. But the point isn’t the cheapness - it’s the scale.”

“In India, given the scale of content consumption, there are a lot more companies that are going to adopt AI tools for content manufacturing. CAN is the only prominent player we can talk about as of now. But we see the media and entertainment sector as a space, which is going to need a lot of AI to get the scale and speed of content that customers like you and I have gotten used to consuming.”

“Opportunities have changed now in music production. Earlier, an ad agency would hire an artiste to make a jingle. Now you don’t need to hire a professional artiste, now for most of the cases you don’t need a musician to do this.”

“We can go on to make a lot of content out of AI, which could be less time-consuming than a live-action film. But unless the audience believes the character, and feels emotionally connected to what’s happening on screen, and if the cinematic illusion breaks, the audience does not want to pay for the content.”

“There is a possibility of AI-generated content replacing what has so far been created in the animation domain. But that has never been a big market in India theatrically. At this point, the technology isn’t sophisticated enough for people (in cinemas) to suspend disbelief around what seems like a comic book coming to life, and I think we are a long way off from this becoming mainstream.”